Current and potential future impacts of food- and water-borne parasites in a changing world: A Norwegian perspective

Abstract

In 2021, the Norwegian Scientific Committee for Food and Environment published a multi-criteria risk ranking of 20 potentially food-borne pathogens in Norway. The pathogens ranked included five parasite taxa (3 species, one genus, one family): Toxoplasma gondii, Echinococcus multilocularis, Giardia duodenalis, Cryptosporidium spp., and Anisakidae. Two of these, T. gondii and E. multilocularis, scored very highly (1st and 3rd place, respectively), Cryptosporidium was about midway (9th place), and G. duodenalis and Anisakidae ranked relatively low (15th and 20th place, respectively). Parasites were found, on average, more likely to present an increasing food-borne disease burden in the future than the other pathogens. Here, we review the current impact of these five potentially food-borne parasites in Norway, and factors of potential importance in increasing their future food-borne disease burden. Climate change may affect the contamination of water and fresh produce with transmission stages of the first four parasites, potentially leading to increased infection risk. Alterations in host distribution (potentially due to climate change, but also other factors) may affect the occurrence and distribution of Toxoplasma, Echinococcus, and Anisakidae, and these, coupled with changes in food consumption patterns, could also affect infection likelihood. Transmission of food-borne pathogens is complex, and the relative importance of different pathogens is affected by many factors and will not remain static. Further investigation in, for example, ten-years' time, could provide a different picture of the relative importance of different pathogens. Nevertheless, there is clearly the potential for parasites to exert a greater risk to public health in Norway than currently occurs.

Keywords: Climate change; Food-borne disease; Host distribution; Risk-ranking; Scandinavia; Water-borne transmission.

Graphical abstract

Fig. 1

Ranking of food-borne pathogens in Norway by expert knowledge elicitation (VKM, 2021). Bars in red represent parasites, bars in blue represent bacteria, and bars in green represent viruses.

Fig. 2

Data from the Norwegian Centre for Climate Services (NCCS, 2015) showing areas in Norway according to their exposure to predicted effects of climate change (A) and deviations in annual temperatures from the mean temperature during 1917–2000 in mainland Norway, hinting at effects of climate change under the current scenario (B). Red bars illustrate positive deviations in temperature, blue bars are negative deviations in temperature, and the line shows the trend.